Monthly Archives: June 2017

Ephemera

Multiplying, no Subtraction

1 Comment

I know that I often speak of downsizing, getting rid of my possessions.   But things keep following me home and I am powerless to resist (well perhaps I don’t try to resist all that hard).   I love rabbits, they are so adorable and who could possibly have too many rabbits (probably me).

Besides having the outdoor rabbits I now have these cuties (yes I am aware that I didn’t really need them, but).

These ones are small enough to fit in my pocket, and they were left over from our most recent garage sale, so I decided to give them a good home.

And books continue to be a weakness as well.   And these were free, but I did promise myself that they will join the great cosmic pile of stuff out there, somewhere, at a later date.

These will join them too.

But for now I have had to find places and spaces for this stuff to reside.  I do notice that the ceilings are rather bare.   Hmm.

 

 

Ephemera, Town

Downtown Sunday

1 Comment

I really can’t resist street festivals and the like, so this Sunday found me in our tiny downtown area.  So I started off in the park, at the Farmer’s Market, with the families, couples and sleeping homeless people.

In summer, the Uncle Wilbur fountain provides a place for children to frolic and get drenched (this is what it looks like at it’s apogee when it is hardly spraying).  Usually Uncle Wilbur is hiding under the dome, but he comes out once an hour or so.  (The fountain is named after an early resident who liked to play the tuba to “entertain” people).

This stand is named after one of the famous crops grown in our fair state, although it does not contain any actual dope, I hope.

And there was a band in the park, playing in the bandstand, singing soft rock songs about peace and love.  But over on the next street there was a festival of a different sort.

They had a band playing covers of hard rock music, to a crowd of black leather wearing, tattooed biker types.

It was all about the motorcycles: preferably loud, decked out Harley Davidsons, but there were other sorts of bikes there too .  This young woman  and her similarly dressed cohort were there to flog Indian motorcycles.  She looks quite knowledgeable about the product, I’m sure the guy was asking about technical specs.

As with last week there were all the elements of a successful festival:  music, food on sticks and beer, as well as this fellow wearing a furry helmet as a bonus.

 

Doings, Ephemera

Tribes

Leave a comment

I love local festivals and I try to attend as many as I can.   They are pretty much all the same, (stuff for sale, food on a stick, music and beer) perhaps that is why I like them.  So I was at a Celtic Festival on a fine Father’s Day afternoon, and I noticed that even among the ‘Celts’ there seemed to be a number of different tribes (and not just a difference in the tartans!).

There were the organized groups.   They were neatly dressed in well pressed kilts, a very formal group.  (Don’t know if the bagpipes had to match.)

There were the re-enactors, striving for authenticity, or what passes for authenticity.  I expect they have battles and such as they seemed to possess rather a lot of arms.

Then there were the Celtic dandies.  Not content with just wearing the kilt, they added a jacket or vest and a swag of tartan draped over their bodies.  It is a rather fetching outfit.

I saw a lot of young men going for a ‘Braveheart’ sort of vibe.  One has to have a lot of tattoos and to wear one’s kilt with a certain swagger.  (In answer to the question “what does one wear under a kilt?”  I did see a pair of bicycle shorts).  😉

Perhaps the most unique of the clans was ‘Clan Santa Claus’.   They were definitely going for a different take on the whole Scots thing.  I suppose we all belong to one clan or another, but on this day folks were openly proclaiming their allegiance to a country and an ideal that the ancestors left far behind.

Town

Steeple Chasing Pt. 2

Leave a comment

An interesting thing about churches is how the builders use architectural styles to proclaim the building’s purpose.  The first three examples in last post were all built fairly recently, but were all built to the same ancient template.  The buildings in today’s post all come from the local downtown, and are what the congregations dreamed up when they thought of building a church.

Not content with their church having a single steeple, this church features two steeples.

I’ve always liked the looks of this one, it puts me in mind of an ancient rocket, ready to blast off in case of apocalypse.  The giant phone towers that loom over it from the phone company building next door add to the futuristic vibe.

I’m not sure if this counts as a steeple, or is it just a pointy roof?  The building is of solid looking stone, it’s not going anywhere.

This one is the most impressive of the lot, with it’s tower crowned with spires.  And there is no mistaking it’s purpose.  What is impressive about all of these is that they were built in roughly the same time period, with each group seeking to proclaim that they were the ones to join.

Town

Steeple Chasing

1 Comment

When you ask children to draw a house, they almost always draw a triangle atop a square, whether they actually live in such a building or not.  It represents the idea of ‘house’.   When I was in the South, I also discovered the template for the idea of ‘church’ and it is different from the sort that we have here in town.

Churches declare their identity with a pediment over columns on the front, and a complex steeple rising from the roof.  The building otherwise is just a large box, perhaps a bit like the idea of house.

They seem to also need to have the window in the pediment as part of the identifying features, although I can’t imagine it having a functional role.

Of course I wondered where the original models came from.

I’ve forgotten where I downloaded this image from, and also who the actual artist was that was inspired to immortalize this.  But I think it is a church somewhere in the New England states.

And then there is this London church, it has the columns in front,  but no pediment, with the round window and massive steeple.  I suppose the steeple was meant to make to building stand out against it’s surroundings.  And this church has the admonition written on the side (perhaps it should be the 11th Commandment) “Commit No Nuisance”.  Generally good advice.